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Neoliberalism, the Public Sphere, and a Public Good

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Neoliberalism, the Public Sphere, and a Public Good Quarterly Journal of Speech ISSN: 0033-5630 (Print) 1479-5779 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rqjs20 Neoliberalism, the public sphere, and a public good Robert Asen To cite this article: Robert Asen (2017) Neoliberalism, the public sphere, and a public good, Quarterly Journal of Speech, 103:4, 329-349, DOI: 10.1080/00335630.2017.1360507 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/00335630.2017.1360507 Published online: 16 Aug 2017. Submit your article to this journal Article views: 1490 View Crossmark data Citing articles: 9 View citing articles Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rqjs20 QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF SPEECH, 2017 VOL. 103, NO. 4, 329–349 https://doi.org/10.1080/00335630.2017.1360507 Neoliberalism, the public sphere, and a public good Robert Asen Communication Arts, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI, USA ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY This essay considers the challenges that neoliberalism raises for Received 2 June 2016 conceptual models and practices of a multiple public sphere. Accepted 25 December 2016 Engaging difference and attending to inequality, a multiple public KEYWORDS sphere facilitates the circulation of a dynamic public good that Networked public; may articulate mutual standing and relationships among people “ ” multiplicity; counterpublic; to enable the construction of a collective we for coordinated education; networked local action. Weakening relationships among people and devaluing coordinated action, neoliberalism envisions a public of atomistic individuals who compete with one another for comparative advantage. Flattening difference and obscuring inequality, a neoliberal public presumes a universal subject that obscures its own particularity and discounts the uneven burdens faced by those who cannot seamlessly identify with its mode of subjectivity. Further, for a neoliberal public, inequality serves as the condition and end of competition. Resistance to neoliberalism may arise in the networked locals of a multiple public sphere, as advocates reclaim connections that neoliberalism seeks to deny. Multiplicity constitutes a key quality of contemporary scholarship on the public sphere. Networks of publics and counterpublics arising asynchronously and exhibiting diverse and changing relationships form the basis of contemporary models of publicity. Gerard Hauser, for instance, writes that “the contemporary Public Sphere has become a web of discursive arenas, spread across society and even in some cases across national borders.”1 Seyla Benhabib argues that public discourse involves participants situated across various networks, whose engagement with interlocutors builds something beyond their specific interactions: “it is through the interlocking net of these multiple forms of associations, networks, and organizations that an anonymous ‘public conversation’ results.”2 Within this networked public sphere, actors may participate in various publics in different places, at different moments, and through different modes.3 Moreover, from alternative vantage points in a network, a public may appear as mainstream or marginal. A counterpublic conceived through one set of relations may elicit counterpublicity from others in a network, as Thomas Dunn illustrates in his critical comparison of LGBT and queer counterpublic practices of memory.4 Multiplicity signals direct and indirect, near and distant relations among publics, demonstrating, as Phaedra Pezzullo suggests, CONTACT Robert Asen [email protected] Communication Arts, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 821 University Ave., Madison, WI 53711, USA © 2017 National Communication Association 330 R. ASEN that “public dialogues reflect a multi-faceted negotiation of power.”5 Across the nodes of a network, people do not necessarily engage each other on equal terms. The conceptual model of a multiple public sphere developed in response to a unitary model drawn from the bourgeois public sphere as well as critical attention to the practices of people excluded from particular publics, who have worked together to overcome exclu- sions and circulate alternative interpretations of their needs, interests, and identities. In her famous critique of the bourgeois public sphere, Nancy Fraser outlined this position, noting that the singular focus of the bourgeois public sphere obscured difference and occluded inequality. She urged instead the exploration of multiple publics, including coun- terpublics.6 Scholars in rhetoric and communication have responded enthusiastically to this call, appreciating, as Catherine Squires explains, that the move away from the ideal of a single public sphere is important in that it allows recog- nition of the public struggles and political innovations of marginalized groups outside tra- ditional or state-sanctioned public spaces and mainstream discourses dominated by white bourgeois males.7 Further, as Daniel Brouwer suggests, a multiple public sphere recognizes the complexity of people’s lives by “forcing recognition that human actors participate in multiple publics.”8 People do not only engage in one mode of publicity. Even Jürgen Habermas, whose his- torical account of the bourgeois public sphere precipitated Fraser’s critique, has engaged her work and developed a model of a public sphere as a “network.”9 In our contemporary era, conceptual frameworks and critical practices of multiplicity face a challenge from the rise of the market as a model for human relationships, politics, and society. Referred to as neoliberalism by scholars and some of its champions, this market regime of governance has received widespread interest in contemporary political and social theory. As Wendy Brown notes, “neoliberal rationality disseminates the model of the market to all domains and activities—even where money is not at issue— and configures human beings exhaustively as market actors, always, only, and everywhere as homo oeconomicus.”10 As Brown’s observation implies, neoliberalism holds impli- cations for policy as well as agency and subjectivity. Neoliberal policy initiatives circulate in the seemingly ubiquitous calls to privatize public institutions and services, lower taxes, deregulate industry, and remove social safety nets. All of these actions presumably would instill competition as an ameliorative social principle. Neoliberalism also carries a human dimension that reconstitutes subjects as self-sufficient capitalists—Brown calls them “little capitals”11—who compete to enhance their financial value and attract investors. With the market as the guiding model for human relationships and society, “the foundation vanishes for citizenship concerned with public things and the common good.”12 Not even the public sphere lies outside of the market’s reach. Just as public sphere scholars critiqued the limits of the bourgeois public sphere and developed alternatives, we must investigate neoliberalism, for it, too, poses threats to criti- cal publicity by undermining multiple modes of publicity. Whereas the bourgeois public sphere imagined a single, universal forum populated by educated and propertied white males as the basis for public engagement, neoliberalism upholds a market populated by atomistic individuals as a singular and universal sphere of activity. This vision carries important implications for how scholars may consider issues of equality and diversity, as well as the means for redressing public problems in the pursuit of justice. Neoliberalism QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF SPEECH 331 operates with the assumption that the market treats all actors equally; differences of race, gender, ethnicity, class, sexual orientation, and more presumably play no role in the behavior of market actors and their successes and failures. Incorporated into a neoliberal model of publicity, this assumption makes inequality invisible, threatening the very “rec- ognition of public struggles and political innovations” that Squires and other scholars affirm. Further, neoliberalism imposes a homogeneity on market actors, ascribing to them uniform motivations and goals, namely, enhancing their competitiveness and market advantage. This ascription discounts the productive power of diversity and differ- ence in the public sphere, which benefits people and polities as they engage a wide range of perspectives. Neoliberalism also obfuscates the means for redressing inequality and mobilizing diver- sity by weakening relations among people and devaluing coordinated action. For publics and counterpublics alike, the prospect of efficacious public engagement has long depended on bolstering interpersonal relations and empowering coordinated action. John Dewey regarded perceptions of mutual implication in the conduct and consequences of human affairs as forming the basis of a public. When perceived, consequences do not exert a mechanistic pull on the formation of publics, but facilitate transformative action by indi- viduals, who “reflect upon” their connections with one another: “Each acts, in so far as the connection is known, in view of the connection.”13 Public engagement draws importantly on ideas and practices of mutual standing and connection, suggesting, for example, that people may jointly benefit from the alleviation of a problem. Or that people may work together to address issues and concerns in the name of fairness and justice. Or that people may work together to achieve shared goals that improve collective well-being. Plainly put, public engagement draws on
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